I have enjoyed some of Casey’s work so was wanting to read some more. This seemed to have got a lot of love when it first came out and on Instagram, however, I was bored.  

This book is based on Chloe Green, and she is so close to winning. After her mums moved her from SoCal to Alabama for high school, she spent the past four years dodging gossipy classmates and the puritanical administration of Willowgrove Christian Academy. The thing that’s kept her winning valedictorian. Her only prom queen Shara Wheeler, the principal’s perfect daughter. But a month before graduation, Shara kisses Chloe and then vanishes. On a furious hunt for answers, Chloe discovers she’s not the only one Shara kissed. There's so Smith, Shara’s longtime quarterback boyfriend, and Rory, Shara’s bad boy neighbour with a crush. The three have nothing in common except Shara and the annoyingly cryptic notes she left behind, but together they must untangle Shara’s trail of clues and find her. It'll be worth it, if Chloe can drag Shara back before graduation to beat her fair and square. Thrown into an unlikely alliance, chasing a ghost through parties, break-ins, puzzles, and secrets revealed on monogrammed stationery, Chloe starts to suspect there might be more to this small town than she thought.  

I always start with what I liked. The take down of the small-time vibes and the church, the way that high school is the time for figuring yourself out and having a school and town trying to stop that just isn’t worth it. I love the fact that it was Chloe Green’s mums that started the whole thing 30 years ago because one of them dyed her hair blue, like so help us if you dye your hair a different colour. I liked that the friendship group of like the jock, the drama freak, the artist – sort of like the Breakfast Club, I liked that the found family and how they all agreed to stick together no matter one, even if it ruined their own graduation.  

Finding Shara took way too long, and the love triangle or square just drove me a bit nuts. Like this could have been resolved way earlier. I would have preferred for this to be a story about Shara rebelling against her dad and the small town and people coming out to help and to be themselves. I ended up rooting for them just before ended, but both Shara and Chloe were driving me nuts. Chloe was a shitty friend with a crush that she didn’t want to admit, and Shara had other ways of rebelling without causing a massive headache just before they left high school again all because she had a crush.  

I think I was expecting more because the title had nothing to do with a mystery or something, just thought it was going to be like Heartstopper with some people struggling with their sexuality and instead it was like a small-town mystery about the IT and the outcast being the outcast.